Scripture Daily

Context No. 1728 of 4322 · Deuteronomy

Context · Reflection

Deuteronomy 2:7-12: in context

7For the LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has known your walking through this great wilderness. These forty years, the LORD your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing. 8So we passed by from our brothers, the children of Esau, who dwell in Seir, from the way of the Arabah from Elath and from Ezion Geber. We turned and passed by the way of the wilderness of Moab. 9The LORD said to me, “Don’t bother Moab, neither contend with them in battle; for I will not give you any of his land for a possession, because I have given Ar to the children of Lot for a possession.” 10(The Emim lived there before, a great and numerous people, and tall as the Anakim. 11These also are considered to be Rephaim, as the Anakim; but the Moabites call them Emim. 12The Horites also lived in Seir in the past, but the children of Esau succeeded them. They destroyed them from before them, and lived in their place, as Israel did to the land of his possession, which the LORD gave to them.)

As Moses reviews the wilderness years, he pauses on God's faithfulness through them. The LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands, he says. He has known your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the LORD your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing. Looking back over four decades of wandering, hardship, and want, Moses' verdict is not that God abandoned them but that God was with them all the way, and that in all that time they lacked nothing they truly needed.

The remarkable phrase is the last one: you have lacked nothing. Forty years in the wilderness were not easy years; they were years of wandering, of hardship, of monotonous manna and uncertain water, of a whole generation living and dying between the promise and its fulfillment. In the middle of those years, it surely did not always feel like abundance; there were complaints, fears, stretches that felt like deprivation. And yet, looking back over the whole span, Moses can say: the LORD was with you, and you lacked nothing. What may have felt at times like want was, seen whole, a provision that never actually failed; through all forty years, God kept them, and their true needs were met. There is a gift here in the practice of looking back. In the middle of a hard and lean season, it is difficult to see God's provision; the want feels real and the future uncertain, and we wonder whether God has forgotten us. But looking back, from the far side, we often see what we could not see in the middle: that God was with us the whole time, that our real needs were met, that we lacked nothing we truly needed even in the wilderness. This backward look is worth cultivating, for it builds trust for the seasons still to come. To be able to say, over the hard years behind us, the LORD was with me and I lacked nothing, is to gather evidence that steadies us for the wilderness ahead. The God who was with Israel through forty years, so that they lacked nothing, is the same God who is with us through ours.

Can I look back over the hard and lean seasons behind me and recognize, as Moses did over the forty years, that God was with me the whole way and I lacked nothing I truly needed, and let that backward look build my trust for the wilderness ahead, that the God who kept me then keeps me still?

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